


Numbers

by Starlithorizon



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Angst, Bullying, Character Study, Episode: e021 A Memory of Europe, Episode: e033 Cassette, Family, Fluff, Found Family, Gender Issues, Love, M/M, Native American Character(s), Trans Character, this is a lot of things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-18
Updated: 2014-08-18
Packaged: 2018-02-13 16:44:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2157888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starlithorizon/pseuds/Starlithorizon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cecil's life was a series of numbers and events and people. He didn't always remember his past, but he did know that he was always loved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Numbers

**Author's Note:**

> This was written well before we found out that Steve was Cecil's step-brother, so it's a little dated. It's also loosely inspired by a bunch of headcanons and art that all sort of shaped my own Cecil headcanon.  
> Also, I am both white and cis: as such, if I've treated any of the issues here poorly, please don't be afraid to call me out. Even if it's a poor wording choice. I did quite a bit of research, but I could have made a mistake I didn't even know was a thing.  
> And finally, Earl Harlan finds a nice fella and I've got to write that one next, seriously.

Cecil was seven years old and wearing his brand new favorite tee-shirt to the first day of second grade. It had been incredibly hard to find, as Shana Elmsford wasn't a popular Hologram, but she was his favorite and when he saw it, he _had_ to have it. His mother relented with a little smile, picking out one in his size and draping it over her arm as they continued to search for back-to-school clothes. He was seven with his new favorite tee-shirt, his Spider Wolf backpack, and his pencils with the really cool fish erasers on the end. Cecil Palmer felt like the coolest kid in his school, and for a while, he was.

It wasn't until he was walking home with his brother Alan that anything horrible happened. Alan was nine and didn't like to walk right next to Cecil, but rather a few feet ahead. That gave the kids an opportunity to swoop in and land a sharp blow to his belly, effectively winding him and putting him on his knees. Alan kept walking.

"Those are _girl_ clothes!" one of the boys yelled shrilly, with all the conviction of a ten-year-old and all the strength of a grown man. "That's wrong!"

"They're not girl clothes," Cecil rasped. "They're my clothes!"

Another blow fell, this time to his shoulder. It was the product of bad aim and no practice. Cecil hadn't taken enough hand-to-hand combat to do much, but when Alan heard Cecil's cry, he stopped. He turned. He leveled the others. Though he was younger than them, all of the little bullies fled with bloody noses and bruises. He helped Cecil to his feet.

"You don't start hand-to-hand till the third grade," he said, "but I think I should help you anyway."

In their backyard, the brothers fought until they collapsed, and Cecil knew what it was like to feel unsafe for the first time in his life.

* * *

When he was twelve, Cecil saw a pretty little glass bottle on his friend Mimi's dresser. They had walked to her house after school, as they had done for the past year or so. His mom would pick him up after work, so it was a good arrangement for everyone.

Mimi was in the kitchen and Cecil was staring at the nail polish and thinking of the pretty glittery teal color on his friend's nails. That was where the pretty color came from, and the shine. His mother wore red nail polish most of the time, the color of fresh blood and violence. This was something gentler, the color of pools in the summer sparkling with sunshine. He imagined he'd smell chlorinated water and sunscreen if he opened the bottle.

"Is it hard to paint your nails?" Cecil asked as Mimi returned with a bowl of popcorn. She looked from her fingers to the bottle on her dresser in momentary confusion before shrugging.

"A little. My hands are kinda shaky, but it gets easier."

Cecil swallowed against the taste of bruises that lasted for weeks and the tee-shirt he had only worn once. The color filled his head.

"Can you paint my nails?"

Again, Mimi shrugged. She set the bowl down on her desk and took the bottle, sitting on the floor across from Cecil.

Later, on the way home, he studied the golden streaks of streetlights as they flashed against his nails the color of pools in the summer. He smiled.

* * *

At fifteen, Cecil had lost everything. His mother had left, probably to return to Camp Verde. She had taken Alan with her, fled the horror of losing her younger son and having him live in the same house. Cecil, of course, knew none of this. He only knew that his mother was gone and that he was living with Ms. Salvo, a nice older lady who was very patient. He didn't go back to school that year, not when he was rebuilding the life that had been stolen from him. Some days, he forgot his own name. Whatever had attacked him, it had razed him to the ground.

When he asked Ms. Salvo (”Please, Cecil, call me Josie.") why she kept a Brazilian flag in her living room, she told him that her heritage was an important part of herself and who she was. Something about that left Cecil feeling hollow, like he'd lost more than his family and his home.

"Do I have a heritage, Josie?" he asked one night as they watched TV. Josie turned it down, quieting the static and the screams, and gave him a long look before speaking.

"Your mother is Yavapai," she told him. "I don't know about your father."

"That's Native American, right?" he asked.

"Yes. I don't know much about it, though. There might be something in the library. I hope so. It's good to know where you come from. It isn't who you are, but it's certainly a big piece."

So he went and learned about his mother's people; _his_ people now. Josie told him the myths and legends as they both had learned them, with Cecil sitting on the floor and Josie on the couch. The words sank into his bones beautifully, filling him up and leaving him feeling closer to whole. He didn't know much about himself, and had vague flickers of faces and fondness, but this helped. It prompted him to grow his hair, long and shining and dramatic. It led him to verbally destroy the first and only person who'd told him to go back to Mexico in a fit of stupidity. It made him spend a month asking Josie to take him to Camp Verde to visit his mom. She'd said no the first time, but not the second, or the third, or any time for years after.

Though he rarely saw his family, they were part of the universe that shaped him. They were part of who he was.

* * *

At sixteen, Cecil kissed Marvin Lee on Josie's front porch. It had been brief and chaste, but as the summer burned hotter, so did their kisses. They burned brightly then went dark when the school year came around. Cecil went back to school feeling so alone, but Earl Harlan was there with his crooked grin and warm eyes. He helped Cecil to paint his nails and braided Cecil's hair sometimes. They talked about the future and the people of the future who sometimes visited.

They went to the grand opening of the White Sand Ice Cream Shop together and continued to go as it flourished into one of the safest spaces Cecil had ever known.

Kids who were like him and who weren't his childhood best friend all congregated around bowls of ice cream and talked about everything that swirled in Cecil's head. They talked about bullies and parents whose religious beliefs shut them out. They talked about gender presentation and safe sex. They talked about lipstick and tough haircuts and the merits of Hanson and Foo Fighters. They spun webs like safety nets and caught each other when they were knocked down.

When Earl was harassed by an older student, with names hurled at him that left Earl snarling, Cecil felt violence in his fingertips for the first time. They had called him terrible names, conveniently forgetting that he was not, in fact, Chinese, and that he was not docile.

Earl managed to land several blows before the idiots could get in a single punch, but that one punch to the nose managed to stay him. Cecil leapt in at that point, all rage and fire, screaming, "He's _Korean_ , you idiots!"

It was a flurry of fury and arms and legs, and sometimes, blood.

Cecil was not violent, but given the right incentive, he could scatter whimpering bullies around his feet, a vengeful god, an angry best friend. The other boys were bleeding and moaning and yelling at each other to _Go, go, fuck it, let's just go!_ and Cecil felt so much angry power in his palms.

"That was..." Earl trailed off. Cecil winced.

"Awful," Cecil supplied.

Earl shook his head, a huge, crooked grin stretching over his face.

" _Awesome_."

Cecil smiled back like a hurricane.

* * *

He was twenty when they kissed. Earl had initiated it, pressing his lips against Cecil's after a moment of breathless hesitation, after asking, "Is this okay?"

It was okay.

The kiss itself wasn't bad. It didn't make Cecil's Top Ten List, but still, as first kisses went, it was all right. For all the luster it lacked, though, it lit sparks in his chest and belly and fingertips. It held promise and something like inevitability, and he tasted it on his lips for weeks after.

They dated, in the loosest sense of the term, for a few months as they both worked toward their degrees. He was twenty-one, and they had done a lot of kissing and things of that nature when Cecil was given the chance to go to Europe. It would be a two-month tour, stretching along places like Italy and Hungary and France and all that, and aside from extra spending money, it was completely free. Cecil had no idea how he'd managed to get this, and he never would, but he wouldn't let it pass by. He flew from Night Vale to Chicago to meet his traveling group, and he missed Earl bitterly. He sent gifts and postcards from Italy and made expensive phone calls from the hostels, and then a boy with all-white eyes and a delicate nature suggested they head to a place called Svitz. Cecil had never heard of it, but he agreed anyway.

Cecil had always been a clever man, but he had also always been a reckless man.

They spent daysweeksmonthsyears in the beautiful fever dream of Svitz, and it sank horribly within him, keeping him grounded and very much there. He wasn't sure how often they left the little shack on the hill, outside of the nightly escapades that ended in the thorny blossoms. They healed their cuts and bruises and scrapes and Cecil forgot Earl in the curving heat of his traveling partner.

When that partner was stolen away by a giant bird, or something equally mad, depending on the day Cecil tried to remember, he fled to another imagined country made real and slunk through its empty, forgotten monuments, the taste of dust and cheap wine bitter on his tongue. He was being pursued, and for a week, that feeling at the back of his neck was his only company. Luftknarp was a chance he could never have taken, in a land of miscolored, stretching faces. He ignored the horror coiling in his belly and ate all that he could, fuzzy with hunger after starving and fleeing for days. He thought he fell in love with the beautiful grey face of one of the men of Luftknarp, and he ached to think of his traveling partner as he boarded the bus to France.

On the flight back, he was aware that he had aged imperceptibly but significantly, and when he returned home, a great deal had changed.

His diploma was framed and hung proudly on the wall in Josie's house.

Earl had fallen in love with a better, kinder man, and Cecil was genuinely happy for him.

His sister had returned with a new name and a husband who loved her incredibly. Alice had not missed Night Vale the way Cecil had, and she _had_ been gone for years. For all of that, though, she was happy to be there again, and she and Geoff were in the process of adopting their first child.

Cecil had come back and everything was different. Once again, he had lost so many imperceptible bits and pieces of himself, but this time, he could count every missing piece. He felt hollow, so he filled the spaces with his town and his desert, decorating his body from his wrists to his shoulders with colorful native flowers over a period of years. He reacquainted himself with the town that only ever pretended to sleep, narrating its everyday successes and failures and slaughters and births, and he made himself feel alive with their lives.

* * *

Cecil officially became an uncle at twenty-six. Janice was born on a rainy day, and he and his sister and his brother-in-law waited in the hospital with the young mother's family. When he finally got to hold his little niece with her big brown eyes and downy black hair, he marveled that he had never believed in love at first sight, until he first saw her. It had been instant, and it had run deep through him, like a lightning strike fanning out into his fingertips and the tilt of his mouth as he sang to her. He wished for her to be strong, and smart, and kind, and beautifully, blessedly, wonderfully grand. There was potential in her soft baby smell, and in her pudgy baby toes, and in her curling baby hands, and in the proper _wail_ that sounded when she decided that she was hungry.

Cecil loved his sister, and he loved his mother and Josie and Earl and everyone, and he loved Janice as well. His family was bigger for all the fury a newborn could fit into her lungs, and all the gentleness that her own little family could curve around her.

* * *

When Cecil was twenty-nine and living in a crappy apartment below his crappy neighbor Steve Carlsberg, he got a phone call from his sister and drove faster than he was allowed to the hospital. It was the same hospital where Janice had been born two and a half years prior, and he felt the absence of her like a weight when he sat down beside Alice.

"Have you heard anything yet?" Cecil asked carefully, rubbing at his sister's back. Even now, even after so many years between, it felt strange to have his sister here with him. He'd long since grown used to her being gone, being with their mother, and here she was, years later, barely holding it together.

"Not for a while. He's been in the OR for hours now. It's touch-and-go, they keep saying," she whispered. The fluorescent lights shone like blessings, or maybe curses, on the tracks left by her tears. Her eyes were red and watery still. She shook like a leaf.

Geoff had been mauled in the grocery store by a furious and confused gila bear. The portal had been closed and the damage was being dealt with, both in the store and in the patrons' torn bodies. Geoff had received the brunt of the creature's force, and its toxin.

The feeling was like rocks in his belly, but he was grateful that both Alice and Janice were okay. Janice was with one of Alice's friends, and that was the only good news he'd received the whole time while he waited with his sister.

At one point, he left her to get some snacks from a vending machine.

At another point, a nurse came out, mask hanging loosely around her neck, and said that Geoff would be in the OR for at least another couple of hours. His heart had stopped twice, and the damage was extensive.

In the end, Geoff made it off the table with minimal complications, but he hadn't survived the night.

Alice slept over at Cecil's apartment and hardly even cried. She just stared and stared and stared.

Cecil dreamed of shadows and mirrors and funerals.

* * *

Cecil was thirty-one and confused at best when Alice decided to marry _Steve Carlsberg_ of all people. Steve was terrible, with all the noise he made in the apartment above, and his terrifying views of the world, and the way he _always_ interrupted Cecil when he spoke. He had an awful habit of talking endlessly at whoever Cecil was talking to, boring them to tears and boring them away. At least four dates had been ruined by chance encounters with him.

But, awful as Steve was with his bad habits and generally flaky attitude, Steve loved Alice and Janice both.

He stood beside his sister at the wedding and made faces at Janice where she was perched beside Josie. Alice was beautiful in the sweeping gown, resplendent as she beamed at her new husband. Cecil had to concede that maybe Steve wasn't _entirely_ awful, really. In the short time Alice had dated before finding Steve, she had found a couple of truly awful men who had hated her for not being what they expected. Steve had understood that not all women had been given the name at birth, and he had loved her, and he had loved Janice, and he had joined the family.

Alice was happy, and that was enough for Cecil.

* * *

At thirty-four, a new man came into town, with a perfect and beautiful coat, and with perfect and beautiful hair. Cecil had fallen in love instantly, though he knew that it was a small exaggeration. He had fallen in love with Carlos over months and stolen French fries and kisses like oases.

When he invited Carlos to the Yavapai-Apache spirit run, which he did every year, Carlos knew the significance and said yes. Carlos had walked alongside him, and when they met with Cecil's ethereal mother after the long marathon, Carlos had pulled Cecil in close and dusted kisses across his sweaty temple.

Carlos sometimes braided Cecil's hair on lazy mornings, and once, he'd asked Cecil to paint his nails. They both wore sparkly teal for two weeks before it all chipped away, and Cecil thought of pools in his childhood summers and streetlights and Carlos poking his tongue through his lips as he concentrated on the application. Carlos kissed the pacifism in Cecil's hands as easily as the violence. He loved every second and every inch of Cecil, and Cecil did the same.

* * *

" _Ugh_ ," Cecil groaned on his birthday. " _Forty_. I'm so _old_."

In truth, he was getting there, slowly and by degrees, and for years he hadn't thought he'd make it to thirty, let alone forty. Carlos, who was forty-three and getting greyer all the time, swatted at Cecil's shoulder.

"Forty's not _that_ old," he protested with a grin. Cecil smiled and leaned into Carlos, pressing lightly against his shoulder where they stood.

"Compared to forty-three, you're right," he said, all mischief and laughter. Carlos giggled, which was Cecil's favorite thing in the world, and kissed him soundly.

"You're absurd and I love you," Carlos said, and it sounded like a promise.

With their hands linked and their lips tasting of hope, Cecil and Carlos walked into Alice's home, into Cecil's birthday party. It was one of several, one of many to come, and they didn't know that there would be fifty more years spread between them or that there would be a little girl soon or that there would be three dozen angels waiting in their house once their son moved out.

All they knew, and all that mattered, was that they had each other right now, at forty and forty-three, and that this year was going to be the best one yet.


End file.
